Hermione Granger and the Crystal From Tiber
by SmallBurnyThing
Summary: Hermione Granger was relatively normal until one day someone brought a sample of a newly discovered mineral to her class. Named 'Tiberium' it would either kill her slowly, or save her life.   H/Hr, Gellert as Kane. Badass Hermione  eventually
1. Prologue & Infection

Summary: Grindlewald escaped from a collapsing Nurmengrad with an old, extraterrestrial magical artefact. Forty years later, Hermione Granger encounters a similar crystal to those that freed him at a muggle High-School.

Harry Potter with Command and Conquer elements in the background and a slightly non-human Hermione, enjoy.

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><p><strong>Hermione Granger and the Crystal from Tiber<strong>

**Prologue**

_Friday 13th February 1950_

Gellert stood, tattered fragments of cloth blowing against skin and bone. The only person he'd been able to call friend and share his ideas with had betrayed him. Stabbed him in the back in fact, and locked him up in a prison of his own design. Then he'd apparently thrown away the key and forgotten about him. Oh how lucky he was that he, in a fit of ill humour, had crafted a portion of the wards to allow birds through and leave their excrement on his prisoners. Seagulls had become quite the delicacy over the years until they'd stopped coming about three months ago.

Dumbledore must have assumed him dead, it was the only explanation that made sense. Why else would he leave him there, trapped and starving whilst the wards decayed down to nothing on an unplottable isle that only the two of them knew the location of?

Gellert shook his head as he stared out over the unforgiving Arctic ocean. Why had he learnt his lessons too late? Why had he looked down on Hitler simply for being a muggle? They'd used the same tactics, had the same charisma and power and had both used each other for their own games. The difference was that Hitler, with a couple of trinkets, had nearly taken over the world. Gellert's own successes paled in comparison as muggle science applied to magic had forced him to reconsider parts of his beliefs. Then Dumbledore had struck him down months afterwards, his inner circle turning on him as he re-evaluated everything.

What the arrogant bearded fool hadn't known was that this lonely rock wasn't a prison facility. Fingers that where little more than bone wrenched rusted metal aside with unearthly force as he snarled. Dark brown eyes scanned the corridors, noting the wards and architecture snapping and unravelling around him.

Nurmengrad was a laboratory. The prison cells were simply a place to hold test subjects.

He twisted and turned, ignoring wreckage, ignoring the cold, ignoring the beating wind and rain. He'd walked these paths a hundred times in his head, reciting the plan for his escape. He stopped dead at the final turn; the door to his personal laboratory, the backup wands and his spare equipment lay ajar, jutting yellow crystals covering the walls and ceiling around it. Swearing softly under his breath, he reached for his magic and stepped onto the air itself, flying into the room.

Everything was gone. _Everything._

Every last drop of magic in the room had been consumed by jutting emerald monoliths, as he hovered, their energies drawing in his own levitation. A pale mist had spread throughout the rooms centre, the fumes of whatever this was searing his lungs even as arcs of killing-curse-coloured lightning danced between the peaks. Gellert Grindlewald, the most feared and successful Dark Lord in several centuries felt fear for the third time since his childhood as he calculated the origin of this phenomena.

Hitler had given it to him as a gift; Early in the war a U-Boat had found a small jagged shard of orange crystal alongside a glowing sphere of energy embedded in the ice of the Arctic. It turned yellow on the voyage over as the captain left it in his office remaking at how it had doubled in size. It was a sad tale after that, the old man was already dying from some sort of sickness the crystal radiated when he tried to carve it, splintering it into pieces and throwing dust across the room.

Three men died within the hour, their bodies being consumed from the inside. The fourth though had been changed by the exposure, becoming stronger, tougher and able to survive the atmosphere these things created. He died a week after they returned to port and before Gellert had been informed and had a chance to study him.

The Okkultisch SS had succeeded in destroying most of the infestation through liberal amounts of promethium and the sacrifices of many. They'd presented it to Gellert with the indecipherable sphere in an attempt to... kill him? Favour him? Appease him? Even after all these years he still wasn't sure. Picking the glowing and intact sphere that now crawled with unknown runes from the crackling sapphire blue column that had grown up beneath it, he wondered if the German dictator had known what he possessed.

These things were magical in the same way that biological agents and Dirac's anti-matter was mundane. Had Hitler realised that fate had handed him an evolving magical weapon. Well, had either of them realised the treasure that this master-work possessed they would never have lost the war. ultimate weapon. Gellert knew how readily they would absorb ambient magic, the perfect weapon for mortals to use against wizards. Yet, if what he guessed of their origins was correct: they would also provide his salvation.

Gellert went through his plan once more as he left Nurmengrad behind. Acquire new clothes, new name and a new face... removing the hair he'd always been vain about in return for a simple goatee. Once he'd secured some contacts in Russia, where the magical population wouldn't recognise him, he'd learn everything he could from the muggles and their ingenuity.

He had always believed that the mark of a true genius was to realise when you had made a mistake and seize the opportunities it presented.

His new identity would be a genius and a prophet, Gellert would accept nothing less.

OoooOoooO

_15th December 1973_

"Newly elected Minister for Magic Millicent Bagnold and Professor Albus Dumbledore, Head of their judiciary." The aide announced the pair of magic users to the group of uneasy muggles deep within a secure facility at the heart of England.

"This is General McNeil and Black Hawk Commander Reynolds." The two military men nodded, turning back to the scrawling maps and other datums. "Now, gentlemen, I'm sure you're aware that we, the Allied nations are currently in a state of war with the USSR. This meeting is to seek the aide of our magical counterparts in this war-"

"I'm sorry, esteemed gentlemen but that would be completely against our laws." The old man with the greying beard responded with a sad smile and twinkle in his eye.

"If you'll let me finish Dumbledore, I was to about to add, under the proviso that the Russians have secured magical assistance from their counterparts." The Prime Minister emphasised.

"That is a quite impossible accusation, I'm afraid." Dumbledore said calmly. "I know for a fact that, whilst the Soviets certainly overturned the non-magical Tsar, the magical community of Russia was quite put out with them and is still a determined monarchy. Why, they common muggleborn over there has access to neither wands nor learning. The best you'd find was a few people with uncommonly good skills or strange talents as a result of it." The military personnel shared a look. Someone very like that had defected to their side a few months ago. "I assure you that they pose very little threat to your nation."

Commander Reynolds, the German national who'd personally overseen Tanya's escape and recruitment into the Black Hawk program disagreed. He'd seen what that girl could do and the idea of a few hundred people like that scared him. But he didn't raise a protest, pulling the photography their spies and satellites reported instead, he passed them to the magicals.

"As you can see, the Soviet's have access to lightning throwers, rapid fabrication, planes that defy standard laws for weight and mass along with a highly advanced space program. There is no physical way they can be doing this by mortal means. We believe the source of these advances to be a magical mineral we've dubbed 'Materia'. A crystalline structure that appears to leech precious metals from the ground itself." The general said coldly. "Or transmute them from dirt and stone. As a result of this we are certain it is at least partially magical in nature and are requesting your assistance to contain and neutralise it."

Dumbledore looked it over with a cautious eye. "I am truly sorry, but if the Russians have detected and isolated this on their own and are already utilising it to the amount you are suggesting..." Dumbledore trailed off, considering the amount of effort that would need to be put in to verify this information, the risk of sending in obliviators, Aurors and others and the need to have them in the country to deal with the new Dark Lord that was starting to emerge from the woodwork. "Any action on our part would be a breach of the Statue of Secrecy."

"Are you certain Dumbledore?" The Minister asked absently.

"Defnitely, I'm afraid there is nothing we can do to help you." He turned, "Now then, I needed to talk to you about this Lord Voldemort person, I have a couple of suggestions I'd like to run past you."

"Surely my office would be a better place to talk about this?" Bagnold suggested. Dumbledore nodded and they both disappeared with a crack.

The Prime Minister of England stared at the space they'd been, lost for words at the sheer bloody arrogance of their countries magicals.

"Project M is Green." General McNeill stated firmly, staring at the map and the layer of red that was ripping it's way through France. "There should be facilities here, here and here." He marked them on the map. I want at least five teams assaulting multiple locations. It's too late in the game to just take the Materia, we need the refining and fabrication technology that goes with it." He threw the pencil to the desk, staring at the Black Hawk commander. "Whatever it takes."

Commander Renalds sighed. "Even Tanya?"

"Especially Tanya, we need a local to help hit one of their green sites." The General stated firmly. "And she terrifies me. Think what she'll do to the Russians."

The Commander sighed. "The losses will be..."

"Acceptable. So long as we get that tech, otherwise we just won't be able to match their manufacturing and weapons advantage." The General said with sick finality, meeting his eyes. "I'll take full responsibility for this if it fails. Otherwise, you'll be in charge of securing and developing this technology. This is our second to last resort."

The Commanders eyes hardened. They'd put nukes on the table. However much he hated doing things like this, he knew where to place the blame. Once this war ended he was going to work out everything he could about Materia, and, once that was done, he'd find ways of the mortal man to work against those arrogant magic users for when they finally deigned to take of notice of mere mortals.

OoooOoooO

_16th April 1978_

Stalin was dead, still looking to be in his fifties. The Great Mission was over, their nuclear payloads rendered useless by the completion of the Strategic Defence Initiative four years earlier than their analysts had predicted. Ledvik Gorbin, looked through the satellite shots of the Florida Exclusion zone one last time. The Americans had stolen more than their manufacturing techniques and their precious fabrication technology. They'd also taken to talking about 'ditry warheads' and 'radioactive exclusion zones' to hide Materia from the public.

He had thirty pictures of a destroyed military base peppered with glowing green crystals to show that for the lie it was. The days when a little Gold materia was used to leach mineral deposits on the field for rapid repair and reinforcement were long gone, what was left were the massive, well defended manufacturing facilities that exploited green materia's ability to transmute, for the want of a better word, soil and stone into it's own strange crystalline mass that formed the backbone of the Third War's arms race.

All because no one had been willing to bomb or nuke the sites and risk spreading the green plague into the atmosphere. Green materia just didn't go away like that. It could be harvested, refined into raw materials and waste product that could then be sprinkled back onto the fields or partly used as an experimental fuel. What they didn't have was the ability to remove it completely. It made his personal view simple, and the same as his leader's.

He threw the pictures down, watching them slide along the ebony great table their little conclave met at. "The war is over." His voice was a whisper, but they all heard it. "The propagator is dead, the Ingrad battle line is a stalemate. Nuclear weapons are no longer an option and we cannot scale up production further without risking significant population centres."

"Internal security will disagree with you on that one." The ancient, grey haired man at the head of the table raised a token protest. "We'll be shipped to Siberia before you can smoke a cigar if we so much as talk of it."

"Siberia will be a problem." Gorbin stated firmly. "One of my Commanders is dealing with it as we speak." The others looked shocked. "On paper they are searching for Stalin's murderer, but he is as sick of this war as we all are. The position and location of several key soviet figures have been leaked to the Allies. Black Hawk Commando teams and that blasted Tanya will probably be dealing with them as we speak. If not..." He shrugged.

The others looked around nervously, talking was all well and good, but to have already taken action? "What happens afterwards? A dominated Russia, living under some American Tsar?" Someone asked. Gorbin snorted.

"Why would they do that?" He met the eyes of the populist, Markov Millentvich. "It goes against their ideology to subjugate a populace that has risen up demanding it's democratic rights. The old guard, present company excluded, will be dead and some of us will rise up to fill the gaps. We all know just how _popular _Stalin's regime has been despite his cult." He stood.

"I imagine we will have to make some concessions, the reformation of the UN with greater powers to make it something over than a glorified debating theatre. A few parts of our nation will seek their own independence. We let them. Half of them will come crawling back within a year the rest are too much trouble to worry over. The Americans will accept it to remove the spectre of communism and the other Allies don't have much of a choice in the matter." He outlined a very realistic course for the future to take, the others nodding along in the background.

"And where will you be in all of this?" The most political savvy member of their group asked at the end.

"Where I've always been." Gorbin said with a wry smile. "Dealing with our Materia problems and maintaining the material supply for this country." They could all agree with that. They had oil, what sort of profit would green crystals give in comparison to that? Their production was constant and would create a glut of metals on the commercial market, lowering the price of silica, copper, titanium, aluminium, silver and others to nearly nothing.

They left shortly after, saying their farewells.

Gorbin took the trams back to his well off condo, watching the streets and shaking his head at his nations inability to grow enough bread to feed its people whilst he, at the head of it's military production, had built walls of iron across Europe.

Nevertheless he poured himself a small shot of whiskey, pondering the icy night of Moscow trying not to check that the shipments of food and goods had reached his research centres. Today he celebrated the end of an era. Whisky gurgled into a glass, the first sign he had that he wasn't alone.

"They took your advice well?" That perfect voice sounded and Gorbin turned, bowing low before raising his glass in a toast to the man before him. Shining scalp, black goatee and the most enthralling eyes.

"No, they took your advice brilliantly." He inclined his head to the man. "I still feel like I should be calling you something special... Kane just doesn't do you justice. No mere man can orchestrate everything I've seen or guessed that you're responsible for, or appear in a guarded apartment without making a sound."

Kane smiled faintly, bowing his head in acknowledgement. "I know, brother. But it would demean us both if I claimed to be above you, for we are helping each along the path. That was what this was for, this war. For only during times of death does humanity truly strain to overcome it's shackles. The strides we have made, the people we have met, none of this would have been conceivable without this conflict. Between us all we have managed to progress our technology by a decade, if not more. Now it has served its purpose."

"Because it won't stop." Gorbin said softly, seeing parts of the plan. "The labs are all fully operational and ready. Spare materials will be dumped on the commercial market, advances will filter down as scientist are laid off and companies form, production costs will become very, very small. A bar of copper worth almost as much as a loaf of bread." He smiled, shaking his head. "Fifteen years ago, I doubted you. I was fool." He raised his shot glass, half of the amber liquid swirling in the artificial light. "To the Ascendance of Humanity."

Kane, formerly Gellert Grindlewald, nearly immortal wizard and leader of the Brotherhood of Man, raised his own glass. "To our Brothers and Sisters."

The glasses chinked and shots where downed.

OoooOoooO

_1st November 1981_

He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named was dead. So were Lily and James Potter, but that didn't matter; You-Know-Who was dead, gone. The war was over. Flights of owls scared muggles as the magical world celebrated. A child was left on a doorstep. Life was good.

OoooOoooO

_23rd August 1983_

"To what do I owe the pleasure of this meeting?" Dumbledore asked, taking in the assembled Aurors and their new head of department with tinkling eyes. "It's not often I get summoned to the department of Law Enforcement."

Amelia glared at him. "I don't know how to say this so I'll put it bluntly, I did an audit of my departments two weeks ago and it found several detection dead zones that we apparently had no idea about. So I sent a pair of Aurors to investigate. Those two Aurors were immediately confronted and held at gunpoint and imprisoned by a group of muggles who seem to posses the capability of seeing through invisibility cloaks. They were then interrogated and politely informed that what they were doing was not a breach of the Statue of Secrecy and therefore none of our business, as per the guidelines laid down by one Albus Dumbledore."

"Preposterous." The Headmaster said immediately. "I would never do such a thing. Surely this is a simple matter for the Misuse of Magical Artefacts to clear up? They can't have gathered many magical items."

Amelia smiled and shook her head. "There was an entire military base there Dumbledore, and a large amount of it was registering a trace of magic. Moody said they even had some moving painting that showed you and Minister Bagnold talking to several of their military about similar installations in Russia and telling them that we couldn't intervene."

Dumbledore looked about the room, taking in the expectant glances thrown his way. This had the potential to go hideously, hideously wrong. He had to consider the wider picture: He vaguely remembered some accusations regarding the Russian magical establishment back when Voldemort had just begun. The truth was that this wasn't a limited problem, it would be a worldwide one.

"At this point removing or resorting to any other sort of hostilities would result in an open breach of the Statue of Secrecy. Other nations' governments must know of these facilities and likely have their own, the sudden disappearance of these sights could alert them to our existence." He stroked his beard. "Also, I feel that should we miss one or two knowledgeable people they might view it as an act of war or something equally stupid. Admittedly, it's possible to see through invisibility charm by mimicking a snake's view of the world and muggle's could possibly be duplicating that, but they could equally have found a way of penetrating concealment charms or a defence against obliviation."

"They're just muggles." One of the Auror's said, dismissing them out of hand. Dumbledore sighed, taking off his glasses, fogging them and beginning to clean them with his robe.

"You are too young to remember the days of Grindlewald, when London burned as a result of the muggle war. Till that point we had believed muggles beneath us, the repelling wards a presence to stop ourselves from pestering and idiotic witch-hunts. At the start of 1942, one of Hitler's bombers missed his target and twelve wizards died." He looked sadly up at them. "At that time there didn't exist a spell or ward to defend against their weapons. To be honest, few were developed and there weren't many who learnt to cast them." He took them all in. "Never underestimate the muggles ability to destroy, it is why our societies must never be joined."

"So what do we do about these bases?" Amelia asked in the silence that followed Dumbledore's pronouncement.

"I will take it before the ICW." He stated firmly. "If something is to be done about this, it will have to be done worldwide."

"They'll do nothing but sit around and talk." Amelia pointed out. Dumbledore snorted and smiled.

"Let us hope, for all our sakes, that they do not."

But September was close, and Dumbledore would return to Hogwarts. The matter was touched on briefly before the diplomats went onto other things, like the proper thickness for cauldron bottoms. Which varied, depending on which potion you wanted to brew, but the proposer was not a potioneer and refusing to hear the guild out. It was slowly but surely descending into a feud that their ancestors would laugh at.

**Chapter 1 - Infection**

_12th April 1990_

Hermione Granger, age 10 and three quarters (nearly), wasn't paying attention in class. This was normal. Her teachers had commended her on it, it stopped all of the raised hands and the asking of questions they couldn't answer. Weyborn Academy was a school for exceptionally talented students (with rich parents) and their rooster of Alumni boasted of politicians, generals, professors and some of the most talented researchers employed in the Philadelphia project. Their teachers were similarly qualified.

There was just something about Granger. It wasn't her parentage, though the pair of dentists did struggle with the fees for their institution. It wasn't quite her intellect, which could make experts in their fields sit down and think for a few moments when confronted by her. It wasn't that she was loud, or boisterous, or got in your face. It was that moment when she stopped. Stopped everything, and considered you.

There was just something unnatural about her. The teachers agreed on it and the students agreed on it. Even her parents agreed on it.

In short: her life was hell and the only thing she could rely on was books and the safety of knowing things. Lots of things.

Hence why, when her pen stopped, people paid more attention to her than Mr. Department Head in the West-European Research Consortium of the United Nations. Even if he was the father of their years most popular child and giving a talk on their latest discovery on parent day. Hermione Granger's eyes were fixed firmly on the slim dark greeny blue crystal said person was holding.

"Do you have a question?" The self-important man asked condescendingly as he felt the attention of the room turn to the misfit. Her eyes weighed him as her head tilted to the side.

"Do you really believe this crystal was discovered only three weeks ago by the Tiber river?" She asked with a puzzled frown. The man looked stumped.

"Why wouldn't I? I have seen conclusive came done with the asteroid. Why I got this very sample from the research team themselves to show to the upper management of the project." He held it up to the light, illuminate the thick blue fragments embedded throughout it's structure to the class. "If you look you can see the large impurities that vastly reduces this crystals net worth to about ten dollars. In it's pure form the mineral is lovely green colour and worth nearly a hundred, they've named it Tiberium after its discovery by the Tiber river in Italy."

Hermione was not dissuaded that easily. "But military budgets have been slashed year on year, yet their operations keep growing. The same could be said of the space project, as part of the SpaceX assignment I made conservative estimate of putting up a self-sufficient space station. With all the problems I have no idea about it was still..." She trailed off, paling as realisation dawned. "Forget I said anything, I must have been mistaken." She replied quickly trying to smile up at him. People laughed. She went back to her notes. The Not-So-Cold War following the Third War may have been over, with the former USSR welcomed back into the fold of the United Nations, but she wasn't stupid. She'd read what happened to people who questioned things or probed too deeply into state secrets. How the military built so much stuff was definitely a secret.

Her hand refused to move as the man at the front of the class seemingly made words up to try and describe this new wonder mineral they'd discovered. Large amounts of aluminium, titanium, other rare metals used in advanced military equipment, emitted potent, similarly rare gasses that where fairly toxic. It was also radioactive. She blinked, totalling up the percentages on her notebook.

No one had noticed that it's chemical composition had a large unknown element, it's impurities were likely only classed as worthless due to their inability to be analysed and... It clicked in her mind, liking the slightly fat man to a kid who'd lied to his parents. He wasn't supposed to be showing his new toy around but he couldn't help it. He just like his son, born to brag about things beyond his understanding whilst saying he was 'just using it to show a few people'.

She pondered it. The contradictions in his words: A radioactive mineral that had only just landed on the surface because of a meteor strike? Nonsense, it would have been slag not a crystalline structure lying on the surface. It must have been planted. From a military deposit. Or something. She stood slowly as the man finished talking and slipped out the door behind him. "Sir, I'm sorry for being an idiot in class, but I couldn't get a good look at it from the back so I was wondering if I could have a quick look?" He smiled down at her.

"You really should learn to pay more attention in class young lady." Gods, he really was patronising. "Edward and his friends wanted to have a closer look at it, but I'm sure he'd be willing to show it to you." Yeah, and then rub it in her face that he had it and _she _was just a annoying know-it-all.

Hermione stopped, turned and fled back to the class. She had to get to him before they... She looked around the empty classroom. Oh no, they'd already gone out to break. This wouldn't be good. She went out to the playground, the large area with wood chips and swings, backing off onto the wood. Hermione's mind worked furiously. Edward was the kind of person to hoard things, so if he didn't want others to see it...

He'd be in the woods. She'd never been through the woods but she'd heard stories. Nasty stories that she was fairly sure weren't true. Fairly. She followed the path carefully, jumping over muddy puddles and stepping round brambles. There they were, she heard voices talking.

Someone pushed her as she got closer, sending her flying to the ground by a tree as her bag skittered away. Edward and his cronies circled around her as her head stopped spinning. "Well, if it isn't the bookworm chasing after me." He dangled the crystal in front of her, his palms red and aggravated. The... weirdness flexed inside her as he glared at her. "Looking to steal my father's work from him, are you?"

Her heart fluttered as the others leaned over her, eyes darting between their uncaring faces. She could feel it growing, like ants crawling under her skin. "Please," she begged, "I just want to see it, examine it. Please?"

He spat on her and she flinched. There was a twitch and she cringed as they gasped. What had she done? What had she done? Her eyes opened slowly. The crystal in Edward's hand was glowing an unearthly green, motes of blue dancing around it. Not good.

"It burns." He snarled, tearing his skin from the effervescent thing. "What are you? How are you doing this?" The others started running. She pushed her back further into the tree. "Fine you want it so bad, have it!" Hermione saw his arm swing back and raised her hands to protect her face. There was another twitch.

Magic is a strange thing. It is power, it is will and it is intent. The crystal drank it like water, so instead of being flung away or bouncing off a shield, it absorbed and reacted to it, fracturing along it's veins as the different coloured parts grew at different speeds. Several sapphire-like pieces accelerated, drawn towards that wonderful source of energy like a moth to flame.

Fragments peppered Hermione's body. Most embedded into her blazer or splattered along the ground, a few razor thin shards penetrated her shirt, a large glowing sliver slicing through the skin where her breast would grow, fate stopping it before it punctured a lung. Overall, she was lucky. Her forearms had protected her face from a single scratch and it had shattered cleanly, there wasn't any microscopic dust to coat her lungs and she'd had a relatively small dose of the newly named Tiberium.

Sitting there, a warm trickle of blood slurping from her chest, Hermione Granger felt anything but lucky. Her left hand, her _writing_ hand, was bleeding and there where these blue and green things sticking out of her arms. And she hurt. Oh god it hurt. Like a burning, aching its way across her body. The tingling tried to discharge as she cried, her magic seeking for a way, any way to deal with the intruder, to change it, to alter it, to expel it. Bloody green shards where slowly pushed from wounds, but the blue ones refused to budge and some of the damage had already been done as they nestled further in.

Tears ran down her face, filling her mouth with the salty taste as bloody, painful hands pressed her legs to her chest. She was dying, slowly and painfully dying. She knew it. Her weirdness couldn't get rid of it and she couldn't adapt to it... Her eyes closed as waves of irrationality weaved through her body.

Time passed. Her eyes flickered open. Muscles protested as she rolled over, dry heaving on the browned spring shoots. Shaking slightly, she got to her feet, the bastards hadn't even gotten the school nurse to have a look at her. Her hands clenched in anger, the wind picked up and light-headedness overcame her. The bottom dropped out of her stomach. It growled.

Hermioned laughed. Shock, she'd read about it, something to do with trauma and... and accidents. She might be weird and freaky (though her parents said she was just 'different') but it had saved her. She was fine, her left palm unclenched, her lovely, unblemished writing palm. She'd been worried that she'd never be able to write again!

Oh how silly she'd been, she smiled, tracing the hard scar-like material that had formed where the cut had been. So what if the skin was a little blue, her strangeness had probably just sealed the mineral in there. Mum could probably take it out like she did splinters. The bell rang. Hermione's eyes widened as people started filtering from the school to waiting cars... It was the end of the day? Had she been unconscious since first break?

She'd missed classes! They'd put her in detention and Dad would get upset and... The young girl, ridding a wave of fatigue-induced-panic grabbed the bag and books that had been knocked aside earlier and ran to the car park.

Nobody knew what to make of the blood stained little girl who stumbled towards her parent's BMW but assumed it was the result of her falling over or something whilst playing with the others. Emiline Jayce Granger (Emma to her friends) caught her daughter as she fell into her arms for hug. "Mia, sweet, what happened?"

"Tired..." Her daughter just about managed to mumble as her eyelids shut.

_AN: Well, that's the prologue and first chapter done. I'm not 100% sure whether this should be a crossover or not since it borrows heavily from the C&C game series but will be almost entirely HP from the third chapter. Hogwarts and Magical Britain is still the same as in the books, it's only the muggle world changed so far.  
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	2. Reaction

_AN: Sorry this one took a while, I'm currently focusing on my main fanfic The Reluctant Lord and I'm splitting time for this with the assorted crackfics that may never leave my hard drive. I know very few people will be familiar with the Tiberium Universe so I'm trying to explain it as much as possible. Then again, it never struck me just how Deus Ex Machina it was until I wrote this. *shrugs* It's no worse than Time-Turners.  
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**Chapter 2 - Reaction**

"Mom..." Hermione's pleading tone stopped Emma by the door as she turned to smile sweetly at the daughter who'd been bed ridden for the last few days. Unfortunately they still hadn't gotten her to tell them what happened, the cuts and splinters stuck in her arm, the left one especially, looked like fractured sapphires, which she knew was impossible.

"What is it sweet?" Emma steeled her heart to telling her daughter that she'd have to spend tomorrow cooped up in bed with books as well.

"Can you... turn out the light?" Her daughter's nervousness fluttered into her own heart.

"Of course dear." She flicked the switched and watched as her daughter took her arm out from under the covers. The scar on the palm of her hand glowed with a faint cerulean light.

"That's not normal, is it?" Hermione asked timidly. "It wasn't in any books I read."

"No dear, it's not." Emma swallowed her unease. "I..." Her brain froze. Things breaking she could cope with, her daughter moving things she'd gotten used too, but now she was glowing? What on Earth could she do to prepare for something like this? Her mind was saying glowing crystal that was sealed under the skin, but she wasn't a chemist and it couldn't be bioluminescence... Biology just didn't work that way; as a doctor she felt she could say that with certainty. She wet her lips and managed a smile before she flipped the light back on. "We'll talk to you about it tomorrow. Everything is going to be okay."

Hermione Granger went to sleep with a happy smile as her mother tucked her in.

"Daniel." Emma asked nervously as she entered the bedroom where her husband waited. "We need to get them out of her. They're glowing."

He looked away and at the floor, running a hand through his balding hair. "I tried that remember? They were fused to her skin. Hopefully it'll grow out because I looked Tiberium up in every database I had access to and I couldn't find anything." He started pacing back and forth. "I thought at the time I'd get a clearance error or someone asking me why I was looking for it but there is nothing that matches the symptoms."

"So it's something new?" Dan nodded, refusing to look her in the eye. "Well, at least it's not contagious."

"In this stage." He interjected morosely, looking up at her with glistening eyes. "What are we going to do Em? We should quarantine her but if we do that and they find out what she's been infected with... We'll never see her again."

"We'll think of something." Emma replied firmly. "We have to."

OoooOoooO

_Four days later..._

Hermione traced the tiny glittering bits spreading across the palm of her hand. It was a tickley, tangley feeling that running her fingers across them gave. It felt so much better than the pale and hard skin around them that looked so... dry. They didn't seem harmful, according to Dad, so it wasn't worth removing them or the crystals when they'd probably just fall out on their own. Like a splinter. Simple, right? It's not like they were growing or anything. Certainly not.

"You've got your gloves, and your antibiotics?" Hermione nodded, slipping the plain black gloves on as her mum held out a bit of official looking paper. "Here's a note which should stop them from taking them off you until those things have grown out, alright?"

Rolling her eyes, Hermione pouted. "I know, I know. They're just like my moving things thing. I'm not allowed to tell people because they might get jealous, or want to study me. And it's against the rules." Emma smiled, that was her daughter. A stickler for the rules.

"Okay 'Mia, now go and get in the car with dad so you can get to school on time." Hermione's eyes lit up with happiness and she danced down the drive. Emma couldn't stifle the chuckle in time, if she'd told any of her patients how happy her daughter was to go back to school after a week of studying from books they'd never believe her.

The line of thought morphed her smile into a grimace. After a week of unexpected absence she had to be back at the hospital and on call. She crossed her fingers and prayed to whatever was listening that her daughter got through her day without any problems.

OoooOoooO

"I see. Edward is suffering from a similar skin condition. I do hope it's not contagious." The elderly professor who was teaching them basic calculus said with a faint sniff, oblivious to Hermione's sudden look of fear. "Regardless, it is good to see my favourite student back in the classroom. Your usual seat's still waiting for you."

She turned, feeling for all the world like a creature on Death Row in America. There, at the back of the class next to her normal corner sat a boy only a month younger than her with messy brown hair and a glare that could kill. A pair of gloved hands were clenched into fists on the top of the table. Something creaked. She gulped.

"What did you do to me?" He asked nastily as soon as she sat down. She just glared back, trying to focus on getting her things out her bag. "I know you did something. What was it?"

"I didn't do anything." She hissed at him, the teacher grabbing some chalk for the blackboard he wheeled in each lesson. "Be quiet, we're starting."

A hard, vice like grip tried to crush her forearm, she gasped and tried to pull away, the _tingling_ building up like a icy fire in her veins. It struck. Edward's grip got tighter. Hermione gasping in pain. "Mr. Walters, cease that this instant, you're hurting her."

"This isn't over, witch." He whispered in her ear. "I know what you are, and if you don't remove this curse my father will..." He slowly unwrapped his fingers from her arm unable to think of a good enough threat to finish with. Hermione's arm ached as blood slowly seeped back into it.

"I don't believe that you will be sitting next to her in my class or any of the others today." The professor snapped. "Now, you will be moving desks and after this lesson has finished I will be escorting you to the principals office." Edward stood slowly, glaring at the girl he blamed for the pains and the agony of the last week. She was scared of him, he could see it in her eyes. Smiling he left the room, his father was far too important for them to do anything to him except a detention or two.

Hermione spent the rest of the lesson as nervous wreck. How could Edward think that she'd caused this. Magic wasn't real. It just... wasn't. Sure there was something strange about her, but that didn't mean it was magic. It could just just have been telekinesis or... well. She didn't really want to think about the other possibilities - she had read some Lovecraftian-esque horrors. It just couldn't be magic. Magic implied that she had some kind of control over it. And she didn't. So there. Still. He wasn't likely to give up was he?

Hermione shrunk in on herself a little more. This was bad, really bad.

OoooOoooO

_Black Hawk Command, Geneva_

"Sir, you need to watch this." The officer interrupting Reynolds' meeting hastily switched the screens to WWN News without waiting for permission. One of his aides went to berate the man before the general's glare silenced him and they turned to the scientist blabbering away at the reporter.

"It was discovered about two weeks ago after a large meteor struck the Tiber river. It's- I can't really describe it to you, in all honesty, if we can develop a way to refine it into its composite minerals we'll be able to conduct perfect mining. It grows as it leaches things like iron and titanium from the ground you see." A picture flashed up on screen and the scientists voice was drowned out by the General's yell as he engaged the base comm system.

"Red Alet, Red Alert, we have an outbreak. This is not a drill, I repeat, we have an outbreak." He yelled over the general intercom. Running one hand through greying hair he went through the possibilities in his head, flicking the prototype touchscreen interface around to get the people he wanted. "Get agents everywhere and hunt down any samples they've taken we need every last lump accounted for. Anyone complains and we class this as a WMD." He paused for a moment, flicking activation clearances to several Black Hawk commando teams. "I need a satellite image of the impact crater since it's creation and I need them enlarged and time-lapsed. Someone inform the engineering department and get a refinery down there asap, we need to stop it spreading..." He trailed off, seeing that everyone else had already sprung into action.

There were a few moments of silence as the aging military members of the group worked like a well oiled machine. The politically appointed aides looked like a wrecking bowl had hit their lives as everyone else ignored them. "Err... what should we be doing?" The more intrepid amongst them asked.

The general snapped out of his planning to stare at them and blinked, trying to think of something he could use to get them out the way whilst he dealt with this mess. "You... can find out why the hell we found out about this from the news and not two weeks ago when they first found it." He snarled. "And start revising the secrecy laws we work under. There is no way we're going to be able to cover this up."

The aide nodded and they slowly went back to their desks. His screen flashed red as reports that several of his troops were unable to move without at least two other forms of confirmation filtered in. It seemed that his most experienced units would be tied up by authorisation committees. "And this," Reynolds muttered under his breath, "is why I wanted the Commander role and mobile fabrication units to be approved. There is far too much bureaucracy in the system to do anything efficiently right now."

"About a minute till the timelapse is done." The officer from earlier informed him as the former special forces commander smiled.

"Good." He said to himself, heading towards the communication officers desk. There was a way around this that no one else could really question. Leaning over his communication officer's desk he said quietly. "Call a general recall of all non-active Black Hawk personnel to my direct command. Including the medical ones." A smirk crossed his face. "They'll be our first response to any threat. Oh, and if a Tanya Adams calls make damn sure she's put through to me asap."

The officer blinked and looked up at his CO with a look of shock on his face. "They let her retire? I- I heard stories..."

"Worst decision they ever made, that, but it's in our favour now since with the recall she'd only accountable to me. Last time I checked she was living near the base in Britain..." Reynolds trailed off. "Get on it. Where the hell is my timelapse?" He yelled across the rest of the ops room. A large transfer bar blinked up on the main screen. It finished in under a second and a high-res image of the former Tiber river filled the room. Every man in the room felt sick to the stomach as they watched a palid green field form faster than any of them had expected. It was like watching death itself crawl across the Earth.

Reynolds was the first and only person in the room to look at the scale and note how close this new form of Materia was to a water supply. "дерьмо, дерьмом, дерьмом..." He recited the one piece of Russian Tanya had taught him and flipped his phone open, dialling the man who had been in charge of the Russian Materia program. "Gorbin, turn your TV to WWN they've..."

"I know." The Russian's slow drawl cut him off. "I saw it earlier. Materia is supposed to be yellow, not green. Tanya's case was supposed to be adaption anomaly, but this..." His English failed him.

"It's spreading at over four times the normal rate. I need one of your teams down there as soon as possible. Get to it." Gorbin stared at his phone as the German disconnected and sighed. This was typical of the United Nations, no sense of camaraderie only orders and frustration. Not that it mattered, the Brotherhood hadn't known of this either, so they'd need at least one team down there examining the site.

Reynolds was too much of a military man to appreciate what they'd been doing. Materia was not some curse to be scourged from the earth at the earliest opportunity, it was the beginnings of human ascendancy. Concerns about resources, energy and even mortality would be forgotten when they'd finally unlocked its secrets. Kane had already taken the first steps. Maybe this new strain could take it further.

OoooOoooO

_That Evening, Walters Residence  
><em>

Thick congealed blood splattered against the side of the sink. He shook again, spasms wracking his body. His grip tightened. What had he ever done to deserve this? His grandmother had told him all about the magical world and how they treated people like her, how they were called 'squibs' and thrown out like yesterdays trash. His body wretched again, trying to expel the hardness from his lungs. Some more blood splattered the porcelain as there was a large cracking crash and he fell backwards. Spluttering on his side, the ten year old boy started sobbing.

Crumbling bits of sink ran off his hand as he watched on, unable to feel anything from it. The curse had turned his entire hand to emerald gemstone. He waited, he hoped that his parents would come for him soon. Make everything better like they used to.

No one came.

Edward Walters was left with a very uncomfortable realisation. He was going to die. And no one cared...

"What the hell was that?" Mrs. Walters asked nervously as her husband paced back and forth.

"Just Edward banging against the floor again." He muttered as he paced back and forth. "He should be grateful his fees are paid till the end of the year. Nothing short of a miracle will stop me being fired due to his idiocy."

"What are you talking about, he can't have done anything, can he?" Her husband shot her a disgusted look.

"Oh, he only lost the one sample of blue Tiberium recovered! A... organism or something that we don't understand and has had some sort of secret service crawling over my department trying to account for every last splinter of the damnable stuff." He stopped pacing to look up absently. "It was supposed to be a waste product that no one would miss when I faked the log of it at the other end. Tommorow they're going to trace it to me and then..." He shook his head. "I'll be lucky if they just demote me."

"For just loosing something? Really?"

"They talked about Tiberium like it was wost than a nuclear warhead, overheard one of the excavators how they were comparing growth rates to other samples..." He shook his head, letting out a slightly hysterical chuckle. "That girl was right, the UN have known about this substance for years..." He shook his head looked up to the sky, his wife slowly wrapped her arms around him. They took comfort in each others arms as their child died a little more inside with each hour that passed.

OoooOoooO

_The next day..._

"Edward make it to school alright?" He asked his wife softly, swirling the bourbon round and round the glass, savouring the faint musky odour as he took a sip.

"I took him there but... He's really ill, he'll be home by lunchtime at the latest. He hadn't even spoken to me this morning." She shook her head. "A rash should have gotten better by now and he refused to take his glove off and show me what had happened. We need to get him to see a doctor."

The doorbell rang, both of them turned to look at each other. "I'll get it." She said quickly before he could get up.

The door opened to a women looking to be in her late thirties, the fitted composite jacket being brushed aside to reveal the pair of heavy duty pistols she wore at her sides. They matched the complete lack of emotion in her sky blue eyes. Mrs. Wilson's eyes searched for an escape route on instinct, the red gleam of a motorbike cut off the car and- An ID badge was shoved in front of her eyes. "Tanya Adams, Global Defense Initiative." The agent said with an air of boredom. "I'd like to talk to your husband about a national security issue."

The housewife blinked, snapping back to reality. "S-Sure, he's waiting for you in the lounge."

Tanya nodded and stalked along behind the housewife, the man she'd come to interrogate looking like a defeated introspective wreck studying his poison of choice. "ID?" he asked without looking up. She threw it at him. "Well, this is a pretty good fake." He barked out as he read it. "You don't have a rank and there's no regiment so you're no in active service. Who the hell sent you?"

"That's classified I'm afraid." She said with a smile. "Now, would you like to explain what happened to that Tiberium sample?" He stared back up at her. She sighed, politicians, they never seemed to grow a backbone until it worked against you.

"Why should I tell you?" He asked, taking another sip of alcohol, "Will it get me leniency?" She snorted, back in the old days she'd have been able to call in a specialist to extract the information she needed. These days she was bound by terms of engagement and she was survivor and a killer, not a torturer. There was a major difference.

"Let me set you straight, Mr. Wilson. People like me don't exist." The hairclip fell to the floor and she pushed her right fringe back behind her ear, watching his eyes widen at the line of faintly glowing crystals she'd just revealed. "And that was before I became one of the two people known to have survived more than three months after exposure to what you call Tiberium. Considering everyone else has died an excruciatingly painful death as result of so much as touching it..." She trailed off, smiling absently. "You should be glad that the sample you had was coated with a thin polymer to preserve its integrity in transit. We wouldn't have a situation if you hadn't misplaced it-"

"The rash." His wife said, covering her mouth with her hands as her eyes went wide. "That means..."

"Contact poisoning, normally they'd have about two weeks to live but the strain from Tiber is more vicious so..." Tanya stated coldly. "They're probably already dead. Now where is it?"

"But he's had it for over a week and he's still alive." The housewife's eyes fixed on hers as she grabbed on Tanya's arm. "There's a cure isn't there? Tell me there's a cure." Tanya just looked at her as though she was an idiot. Hadn't she already said that? "He dropped it in the woods behind the school if you need to find it-"

Tanya pushed her away, not noticing when she was flung into the wall like a ragdoll as she fished her phone from her pocket with her good hand, speed dialing the first number in her phone number. The engine kickstarted as she accelerated off the drive and the phone connected, her helmet spinning off into some bushes.

"Report." Reynolds voice barked down the line.

"Secondary site, at least one contact infectee, first exposure a week ago." She snapped off quickly, accelerating on the main road. "It's in a school commander." She gave him enough time to process that and finish swearing. "I'm on my way there now but I'll need backup." She paused. "If the blue is anything like the green, how large a site could we be dealing with here?" The was a pause before he answered. Her response was to end the call and hit the accelerator.

OoooOoooO

Loosing her bag was the last of Hermione's worries. The sharp tarmac tore her skin apart as she skidded along the floor, hands clutching her stomach as she struggled to pull in another breath. "Are you happy now?" Edward was yelling at her. "I'm dying! If you hadn't wanted to see that stupid crystal none of this would have happened!"

"Master Wilson you will stop that this instant!" The on duty teacher shouted, forcing his way through the circle that had formed between the bully and his prey. The skittish students starting scattering to the four winds in the face of authority. "This behaviour of yours is-"

"Shut up." Edward snapped at him. "Shut up, shut up. Shut up. You don't know what she's done." He turned back to Hermione as she shakily got to her feet. The teacher's hand closed around his gloved fist. Edward snarled.

"Enou-" The man flew twelve feet, knocking some of the children over like bowling pins. Silence descended as everyone looked on in shock. One of their classmates, one of them, had just sent a teacher flying. Some saw Edward as their new best friend, some saw the inevitable retribution of the dreaded detention but only Hermione saw that the PE teacher wasn't getting back up again. The same fist that did that was charging at her.

"_No!_" She screamed, the energy inside her spilling along burning paths as threw her hands out in front of her. There was a ripple in the air, visible for the briefest of moments and the two children smashed into each other, flying apart in a physics defying twist. Both of them rolled along the ground, groaning slightly.

Hermione recovered first, trying to ignore the dull ache in her forearms as she rubbed her side and glanced at Edward. He didn't look like he was going to be up in a hurry but he would. He _never _stayed down. The bell rang. The thought of sharing a classroom with him for the rest of the day made her freeze. Not even the thought of detention and missing class would make her do that - so she ran.

The wood blurred past as she sprinted over muddy puddles and snapped trees before she stopped. Her feet had followed the same path she had seven days ago. The tree she'd been backed up against was blackened and dead, the undergrowth and insects fluttering through the rest of the woods suspiciously absent as a sprinkling of elegant green crystals jutted from the ground. "Tiberium." She whispered to herself, walking as though entranced up to one of the shafts. Kneeling down she ran a finger along the edge, watching the glow ripple and fade under her touch. All of this had sprung from the remains of the crystal they'd shattered. Thin emerald veins ran through the earth, forming tiny nodes of the crystal where they met.

It was growing.

She jerked her hand back with a snap. There, on her glove was the faintest trace of green. Small veins started spreading along it's surface as she watched. That was enough for her, undoing it quickly she flung the glove away, watching it slap and slide down a glowing face. And there it stayed, the green tint spreading painfully slowly. It was worse than watching paint dry. Though she'd never actually done that, so she couldn't really compare the two.

Chewing on her lip, she brought her hand up with a snap. What if it was trying to grow on her as well? It hadn't, at least, not the green stuff. The Sapphire glow disappeared up her sleeve.

It hadn't been like that this morning.

OoooOoooO

Something was wrong. Tanya mechanically kicked the stand down, trying to work out was was happening. A small circle of kids were left in the playground arguing with teachers whilst a sea of faces pressed up against the window. In the distance two adults dragged another back inside. Life had been a lot easier when it had been targets and opportunity, instead of a snafu involving kids. There was a small child in the middle of the circle, patches of hair littering the ground around him. It was the same black as the bastard she'd interviewed earlier.

"Tanya Adams, GDI." She snapped out as she jogged up to them. "If that's the Wilson kid I'm going to have to ask you to move away." The teachers looked at her with a look of disbelief on their faces.

"Why do you have crystals on your face?" One of the kids asked with a puzzled look. Tanya reached up and brushed the nodes, damn it. Should have remembered to clip her hair back in place. "Is that Tiberium?"

"That's classified." She snapped out. "Now, please step away from him, I believe he's been exposed to a chemical warfare agent. It's unlikely to be contagious at the moment but it will be soon."

"But you don't look like a GDI agent..." A small girl pondered with narrow eyes. Tanya resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Just because she didn't wear a suit, sunglasses or body armour or anything obviously counter-terrorist the kids wouldn't take her seriously.

"Yes, can we see some ID please." One of the teachers asked, stepping around the semi-circle that had formed to watch her. Sighing, she reached for her card again, and the idiotic women bent down.

"Edward..." She asked softly as Tanya yelled. Her hand touched his shoulder. Eyes glowing an unearthly green snapped up to look at her and Tanya's heart plummeted. The infection had reached his brain.

The teacher went flying. Tanya took his next punch, slamming the girl she'd shielded into the ground as she flipped over her. Luckily the rest of the kids were smart enough to run because even through bike gear and skin similar to concrete that had hurt. Getting shakily to her feet, she swore, that hurt despite a layer of armour and her own mutation. He was definitely too far along to risk a shot.

Edward's fist flew past the face of the teacher trying to restrain him and she breathed out, giving anything that was cracked or broken a chance to patch itself back up; For the brief period of time someone exposed to Tiberium survived, they were stronger and tougher and 'healed' faster than any mere mortal had a right to be. What it didn't do was make you faster or better at fighting and the teacher looked to be an akaido expert who knew not to get hit. Good for him. She flipped back to her feet and advanced.

As a fellow mutant, what was left of Edward Wilson ignored her as part of the scenery as she walked silently towards him. Then Tiberium enhanced flesh met Tiberium enhanced flesh. His skin was tougher and his bones were stronger but the military version of Krav Maga is neither elegant nor graceful. Just brutally efficient.

"What the hell!" The teacher said as he watched the agent pin his student to the floor with a broken arm and a broken leg. "His eyes were glowing..."

"That happens." Tanya replied absently, twisting the kids limbs so they'd heal at awkward angles. As far as she was concerned the longer he was alive, the longer all that crystal stayed locked in his body instead of spreading like a virus on the surface of the Earth. "There should be a team here soon to deal with this."

"But... he had glowing veins and-" Tanya brushed her hair back to get a better look at him, the softly glowing gems that studded the right side of her face took his breath away. "You're whatever the hell this is too aren't you?"

"The politically correct term is mutant." She said softly, shifting grip to keep the the kid down. "Now, there'll be a team arriving soon. I need you to gather everyone up, check if anyone's been infected and stay the hell away from the woods. You got that?" He nodded and she relaxed slightly as he headed back into the school, leaving her alone in the car park.

The peace lasted about two minutes before sirens pulled up outside the school. Three policeman running across the very crowded parking lot to get to her. "We got a call saying someone was assaulted..." He trailed off. "Jesus lady, what the hell have you done to him?" The one in the lead asked looking at the broken, bucking body beneath her with disgust.

"Tanya Adams, GDI." She sounded like a broken record but it had to be said. "There should have been a message on the radio that I was in the area. If you could form a perimeter I'd appreciate it... Is that a news van? What the hell are they doing here?"

The lead cop shrugged. "Beats me, I've only been on duty for an hour. Now, I'm going to ask you to get off the kid and show us some ID, because I haven't heard anything about a G.D.I opp in this area. We're not too fond of the UN around here either, lot of us lost a lot of people in the Third War." The two behind him reached for their batons.

Tanya shifted her grip again, slamming the remains of Edward into the ground with what the cops probably interpreted as unnecessary brutality. But then, she could barely bend his skin under the clothes he was wearing. "You really don't want me to do that." She told them as looked back up at them. "He's been infected with a category seven chemical weapon. You have no idea what's going on here."

"Definitely a loony here." One of the cops muttered under his breath. "That's straight out of my sons Men-In-Black comic. Extra-terrestrial category my arse." He turned to Tanya, glaring with ill-disguised dislike. "Let the kid up, we'll restrain him for you and you can report back to whoever you report to, alright..." He tried placatingly.

"You can't restrain him." Tanya shook her head. "Now, go and shut the news crew down before they get this on air would you?" The whump-whump of helicopter blades reached her ears. "Finally." She muttered, looking up at the sky.

The policeman took her distraction as a godsend, he could get the crazy women off the poor kid with broken limbs and shaved head before anything worse happened. A green light flicked on the font the camera, telling Samantha Mason, WWN that she was live. They caught the swing of the policeman's baton perfectly.

Normally a Mercury weighted stick when used in the appropriate manner knocks a criminal to the ground and probably cracks the limb struck. All it did in this case was unbalance Tanya just enough that the mutant beneath her gained enough leverage to fling her six feet towards the school.

"Holy shit." Samantha swore as the kid crawled back to his feet. The zoom focused in on the child's verdant eyes, flaking skin and the pulsing emerald veins that crisscrossed up from beneath his shirt. "Tell me you're getting this." She whispered to the cameraman as her earpiece pinged. They'd made her live. "Alright, well, you're joining us at the Weyborn Academy parking lot in the south of England. We don't know what's..." One of the cops was flung close to the car park and the creature pounced after it. "We should probably move." She said quietly to her cameraman. "That's not human. There is no way in hell that thing is human. Some sort of bioweapon or something..." A gunshot rang out, startling both of them and the creature. It turned.

"We were following up reports of a G.D.I operation occurring in the area and- what the hell is she doing?" The plain clothes women was charging at the creature whose limbs were already straightening. It turned and whatever roar it made was drowned out as twin-rotor dropship landed into the courtyard, the golden striking eagle emblem of the Global Defense Initiative on its side.

"This..." Samantha trailed off as the creature's arm erupted in barrage of spikes that soared through the air. The biker who'd been holding it down before thrust her gloved hands in front of her and the spines shattered and bounced off thin air, slamming into the ground beneath the creatures feet. It snarled and she charged.

The first marine off the dropship was two weeks out of standard training. As such he was one of the best equipped and well trained soldiers on the planet. What he hadn't gone through was a briefing on Materia and it's effects on human biology. Only the top brass and special forces got that. So he did the first rational thing when faced with something out of a nightmare, he flicked his safety off and pulled the trigger.

"Cease fire!" Tanya yelled as crystal and blood soared across the playground and car park, fine bits of dust blowing away on the wind. "Hold your god-damned fire!" They stopped, the battered and broken body dropped to the ground, dead.

"Agent-" The marine in charge tried to get off as she stomped towards him.

"What the fuck did you were doing, spreading a fucking chemical weapon across a school didn't you read the briefing?" He took a step back as the wind around her sprung up on it's own. "Get some masks on, all of you. You've just dusted the whole area." She turned, running a hand through her hair. There was a faint crack and she looked to the side. A small crystal was lodged in her hair and since her hair wasn't technically alive, it was fair game. She'd _liked _having long hair.

"We've never been briefed on this." The marine tried to get out. She turned to him with a look of amazement on her face. "Our commander just told us to get down here and follow your orders."

"This day just gets better and better." She sighed. "Your job is to establish a cordon and let no one in or out until the chem warfare crew gets here. If you see anything. And I mean _anything _that glows green you mark it, avoid it and under no god-damned circumstances do you touch it. If your equipment starts glowing green, get to a safe distance and strip it off."

"Miss-" He cut her off, pointing to her jacket. The tell-tale green was starting to spread across that as well. She sighed. "Yes, exactly like that. Whilst I'm immune to this, the rest of you are not. Next, if someone is infected do not shoot them unless you have no other choice. Restrain them, tie them down and let them live or die on their own merits. Once this thing gets into someone it stops being infectious until they die, understood?" They all nodded apart from one.

"How the hell does that work?" The guy at the back asked suddenly. "It doesn't even make sense."

"Magic." Tanya answered seriously. "Otherwise known as I don't have a clue. Now get to it. Also make sure the cops or the news crew don't leave, at least one of them is probably infected." She sighed, pulled her knife out from her spine sheath and started hacking at her hair. "Now, I'm going to do some damage control."

"Well, that was definitely interesting. I don't think we're going to be on air much longer." Samantha said, turning to the camera as the agent shed her coat in the background and draped it over the kids body. The man turned the parabolic microphone back towards her. "We appear to have an outbreak of an unknown chemical weapon here at Weybron Academy, it's effects are unlike any we've ever scene and it bears a striking resemblance to the Tiberium crystals announced yesterday. From what we've seen here today it seems fairly obvious that the United Nations has known of this clear and present danger for some time out only question is-"

"I'm going to have to ask you to shut the camera down and turn over any recordings you have to the appropriate authority when they arrive." The agent's voice cut her off.

"Why should we, and who are you?" Samantha asked smoothly, moving so the camera had a clear shot at both of them with the school in the background.

"Tanya Adams, my badge was in my coat. As for why, whatever legislation they normally use for important secrets, you probably know the drill better than me."

"Special forces?" The reporter asked quickly. "And we've been broadcasting live."

"No, I'm not special forces and I can't answer any questions you may have. Kindly turn off your broadcast before we get swarmed with idiots who feel like they need to know what's going on here." She said nodding at the cameraman.

"But surely the public needs to know what's happening here?" The reporter tried. "And you've got some more growing in your hair."

"I know." She said firmly. "All the public needs to know for now is that a five mile radius around this site is now a quarantine zone because what you call Tiberium has a ninety-seven percent casualty rate to anyone who so much as touches it. The only reason it's not one hundred percent is that some people haven't died yet."

"Are you one of them?" Samantha knew she'd crossed a line as soon as the agent's eyes went dead. She gestured for the connection to be cut before this 'Tanya' went for her guns. He complied quickly, lowering the camera from her shoulder.

Tanya brushed her hair to the side, turned and walked off without saying another word. "Well, that answers that question." She whispered. "What the hell is going on here?"

OoooOoooO

Hermione placed her hand against the crystal again, watching the surface darken under her touch, the faint tingling running up and down her arm as its lights danced back and forth. Pulling it back she stared at her palm. Nothing. Just the faint trace of sky blue lurking under her skin.

Frowning she looked at her glove again; the faintest start of a crystal poking out from it's steadily disintegrating shell. At some point she'd have to go back to school and deal with missing classes and, well, Edward. But until then she'd puzzle over the obvious impossibilities of Tiberium. Kind of like the obvious impossibility of being able to move objects with your mind.

"I thought I'd find you here." Hermione spun when someone else spoke, gasping as she saw the cynical looking women dressed in army fatigues leaning against a tree. Her short black hair was hacked short and a set of crystals sparkled on the side of her face. "And if you say anything about my clothes I will kill you."

"You're..." Hermione pointed to her face.

"A mutant, yeah. No you might want to step away from the Tiberium before you end up needing a new set of clothes as well. I'm Tanya, by the way." Hermione did so, looking nervously at the ground as she held her hands behind her back.

"How does it do that, I don't understand how it works, I mean it should be impossible..." Hermione looked up nervously, seeing the women, _Tanya,_ smiling at her.

"As far as we can tell, it's magic." She answered with complete sincerity. Hermione blinked. Cocked her head to the side and frowned.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." She quoted from memory. "A good enough explanation I guess. This stuff is extraterrestrial, right? It's been around for years... I'm not supposed to know that am I..."

Tanya laughed, making Hermione smile a little despite herself. "Probably not, but since you're like me, you're going to find out the whole story soon enough. Never stop asking questions, It's always the things you don't know that come back to shoot at you. Or infect you in my case." She snorted and rolled her eyes. "I admit when they said you'd run off into the woods I was expecting to find a corpse until they told me of your little skin condition." The girl blushed.

"That's how you knew I was, erm, is infected the right word?" Tanya nodded.

"Initially, yes, but can't you feel it?" She asked softly and Hermione's brow furrowed in concentration.

"Feel what?" She asked after a moment.

Tanya snorted. "The link between creatures like us. I guess you're not far enough along yet. Count yourself lucky, it means you're probably going to live for a couple of years." Hermione blinked and looked away. "You already figured that out didn't you?"

"I saw what it did to Edward and how it was spreading..." Hermione trailed off. "It's getting hard to feel things in my hands anymore."

"Can I have a look?" Tanya asked softly. Hermione held out her hands and the special forces operative reached out to trace one of the glowing veins. "Amazing... I've never seen anything like this. It's beautiful... And cold..." She shook her head and looked at her with a faint smile.

"They're going to put me in a lab aren't they? Mom always said that they would if anyone found out. And now everyone's going to know and..." She looked down and hugged herself. Tanya draped an arm over the slightly distraught girl.

"You can make things move can't you?" Hermione's cute browny-gold eyes fixed on hers. Tanya smiled, focusing on the flare in her pocket and levitating it into the air next to them. Another force started acting on it and fought with hers, the resulting medley sending it spinning off into the bushes where it ignited. Questions were written across the young girls face. "Like I said, magic. No one's going to experiment on us because they know it's something you either have it or you don't. It's the same reason no one's quite sure when we're going to die from our condition."

Hermione tackled her in thanks, muttering '_thank you, thank you, thank you' _as Tanya nervously returned it. "What about Edward?" she asked suddenly, looking back up at the adult.

"He wasn't so lucky." Tanya said calmly. "Come on, let's get back to the school and your parents."

OoooOoooO

_Somewhere in Germany_

Kane snorted. England. Nearly fifty years since he'd set foot on that blasted island. There lived the one man who could still identify him as the wizard he had once been. It was almost pitiful how small minded the magical world was that they failed to acknowledge how far the non-magicals had superseded them. That just drove this problem home really. Did he risk heading out there? The reveal of Tibrium as a threat in this way, in a school full of children no less. It would be easier to control if he was there.

The whole sequence of events was unfortunate, annoying and unforeseen. The United Nations wouldn't be destabilised enough to trigger the war necessary to trigger another wave of technological advances and everyone had already realised that Tiberium was, at the very least, a Weapon of Mass Destruction in the right hands. One of those idiotic soldiers trying to move a crystal on live TV had shown how just how nasty it was as the experienced troops who had just arrived took him aside and hacked off his arm before it got into the blood stream.

What was of interest was the commando who'd been the first to arrive on the scene. His grand experiment, taking the best warrior on the planet and injecting her with an experimental serum he'd brewed himself after she'd been _slightly_ wounded taking out an entire cabal of his brotherhood single-handed. Their blades had been etched with _Materia _but not...

She was emerging from the tree line, child held against her side, the returning hero. She was smiling, that was new. He frowned. Paused the live feed, rewound it. Backwards and forwards. There was something off about this entire scene. Green light danced along her hair and out the gaps off her armour. The colour his potion had taken no longer seemed to be such a coincidence but...

He froze, enhanced the image on the face, blacked the crystals out of his mind and looked at her. It was the hair that was bugging him. Her skin was a little too rosy, and she didn't hold herself like the arrogant little hellion had but the danger, the presence. The icy blue eyes that looked at you chilled you to the bone. He'd known someone just like that. They'd even had a child, hadn't they? A year before the The Betrayal were they died at his side. What had her name been? _Tatyana Dragomirov. _Or Tanya on a child's tongue. Even her age was correct.

Gellert Grindlewald looked out from Kane's eyes at the child of one of his inner circle members, abandoned and cast into the muggle world as magical Russia splintered and burnt. Had he sunk so far that he had forgotten those whom had followed him before? Had he failed them that badly? He knew all to well that a leader must do something for his followers. He snorted, it didn't help matters that the potion had been designed for a non-magical and not a fully mature untrained witch. The result would be completely unpredictable and utterly worthless as an experiment.

But the girl drew a smile from her. He traced the lines on her face, telling himself that he couldn't kill someone's parents just to make someone he owed happy based on video footage. He started the news feed again. Stopped it. Raised an eyebrow. "There is no such thing as coincidence." Kane told himself firmly, eying the faint tint of blue on Tanya's fatigues as the child shifted her grip.

"A blue Materia mutant? Is that even possible..." Kane's eyes twinkled and he disappeared with a crack.

_AN: Thanks for reading, the next chapter will get us up to Hermione being introduced to the magical world. Oh, and Kane/Gellert. _

_Please leave a review if you liked it or have an interesting idea about what could happen when they get to Hogwarts._ _(I'm mostly writing this to find out myself to be honest.)_


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